Category Archives: History

Sherman and Sheridan on War

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General William Tecumseh Sherman is now famous for two things: “marching through Georgia” and his statement that “war is hell”. Sherman led 95,000 men into Georgia in the spring of 1864. A year later, having fought their way to the Atlantic Ocean and then north through South Carolina, Sherman and his troops were in North Carolina when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. Later that month (after the assassination of President Lincoln), Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrendered to Sherman and the Civil War was finally over.

From Wikipedia: “Sherman’s bold move of operating deep within enemy territory and without supply lines is considered to be revolutionary in the annals of war….British military historian B. H. Liddell Hart famously declared that Sherman was ‘the first modern general'”.

Sherman’s goal was to end the war by destroying the South’s ability and desire to keep fighting, not by targeting the civilian population directly but by destroying as much crucial infrastructure as possible. From what I’ve read, he didn’t order the wholesale destruction of food supplies. Nevertheless, having his army “live off the land” had the same practical effect. Sherman understood the severity of his actions. This is from a letter he wrote to his wife In March 1864:

It is enough to make the whole world start at the awful amount of death and destruction…Daily for the last two months has the work progressed and I see no signs of a remission till one or both or all the armies are destroyed…I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash – and it may be well that we become so hardened [320].

In September, after ordering the evacuation of Atlanta, he responded to complaints:

My orders are not designed to meet the humanities of the case, but to prepare for the future struggles in which millions, yea hundreds of millions, of good people outside of Atlanta have a deep interest. We must have peace not in in Atlanta but in all America. You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war on our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out….You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride [339].

One of Sherman’s comrades, General Philip Sheridan, who led his own “scorched earth” campaign through the Shenandoah Valley, explained his actions this way:

The stores of meat and grain that the valley provided, and the men it furnished for Lee’s depleted regiments, were the strongest auxiliaries he possessed in the whole insurgent action….I do not hold war to mean simply that lines of men shall engage each other in battle, and material interests be ignored. This is but a duel, in which one combatant seeks the other’s life; war means much more, and is far worse than this.

Those who rest at home in peace and plenty see but little of the horrors attending such a duel, and even grow indifferent to them as the struggle goes on, contenting themselves with encouraging all who are able-bodied to enlist in the cause, to fill up the shattered ranks as death thins them. It is another matter, however, when deprivation and suffering are brought to their own doors. Then the case appears much graver, for the loss of property weighs heavily with the most of mankind – heavier, often, than the sacrifices made on the field of battle. Death is popularly considered the maximum of punishment in war, but it is not; reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life [327].

A century later, the Geneva Conventions were modified to include the following prohibition:

It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.

For any other motive, including ending a war.

A brief note: Grant and Sherman thought highly of General Johnston, one of their Southern adversaries. After the war, the three were close friends, and Johnston was a pallbearer at Sherman’s funeral. (The page references above are to The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H. W. Brands.)

There is a great collection of quotes from Sherman here, including these extremely prescient remarks he is said to have made in Louisiana before the war:

You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing!

You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it… Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. 

The New Deal and the Same Old Deal

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For those of us under 80 or so, the New Deal was basically President Franklin Roosevelt using the federal government in creative ways to address the Great Depression, which wasn’t fully tamed until World War II began, government spending rose even further and lots of working-age men joined the armed forces (there were 450,000 Americans in the military in 1940 and 12.5 million in 1945).

A recent book, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, tells the story but leaves Roosevelt in the background. The New York Review of Books has a fairly long but excellent review by Nicholas Lemann, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, here. 

The author of Fear Itself is Ira Katznelson, a professor of political science and history, also at Columbia. According to the review, Katznelson considers the national legislature to be the most central political institution in a democracy. For that reason, he presents an account of the New Deal and its aftermath that pays little attention to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman:

Katznelson has no interest in their personal qualities or their methods of leadership. Instead his focus is on Congress and government agencies, and more broadly on political systems, voting, and interest groups. This gives Fear Itself the feeling of a fresh look at a familiar story.

In addition, Katznelson emphasizes the perilous situation the country faced in the 1930s. Germany and Italy had reacted to the Great Depression by turning to fascism. The diplomat George Kennan believed America’s government should become authoritarian. The respected journalist Walter Lippmann told President Roosevelt that he might have to become a dictator. New Deal policies were enacted in “an atmosphere of unremitting uncertainty about liberal democracy’s capacity and fate”.

Becase Katznelson focuses on Congress, the South has a major role in the story he tells. Since the Civil War, the South had been firmly Democratic. In the 1932 election, Democratic congressional candidates received 86% of the vote in the South. After that election, more than half of the committee chairmen were southern Democrats. As a result, Roosevelt needed southern support in order to get anything through Congress:

The South used its power to create de facto regional exceptions to many New Deal policies, either by exempting domestic and agricultural workers (meaning blacks) from them, or by placing administrative and policy control of them in the hands of state governments. To use the most obvious example, the 1935 law that created the Social Security system had both of these features...

It was specifically the South that blocked … the possibility of the New Deal’s moving further left in its policies. The New Deal wound up largely achieving one set of goals—an American welfare state, including retirement security and an empowered labor movement—but stopped far short of another, which would have involved creating, through democratic procedures, a more centrally planned economy….

It was Congress that blocked national planning, for reasons having to do with the southern bloc’s overriding concern with maintaining the regional racial order. The South, in Katznelson’s view, was willing to move left on economic issues as long as that didn’t threaten segregation. When economic policy and race began to seem intertwined, the South opted out on economic policy, and that defined the leftward boundary of the New Deal.

Reading this should remind us how little has changed since then. Much of our politics is the same old deal it’s always been. Since the compromise that resulted in slaves being counted as 3/5ths of a person in the Constitution, America has been politically divided between the North (now including western states like California) and the South (now including northern states like Idaho and Wyoming). 

Of course, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the South switched to voting Republican. But progressive federal policies are still being watered down in order to accommodate southern sensibilities. For example, the Affordable Care Act allowed individual states, especially in the South, to avoid expanding Medicaid, thereby limiting benefits to poor people and low-paid workers (including, of course, poor and low-paid blacks).

Professor Lehmann, the author of the review, highlights other ways in which southern “conservatives” have affected federal policy since the New Deal: by supporting our entry into World War II (Southern politicians tend to favor the military and military activity); by encouraging the creation of our national security state (internment of the Japanese, loyalty oaths, FBI surveillance, the creation of the CIA and the House Un-American Activities Committee); by voting for a “defense” budget that has continued to grow even in peacetime; and by making life difficult for labor unions and people who want to vote.

For example, given the Republicans’ recent attacks on voting rights, this passage from the review is especially striking:  

Katznelson also reminds us that whites as well as blacks were substantially disenfranchised in the South, because of poll taxes. Voter turnout was shockingly low in the South—below 20 percent of eligible (meaning mainly white) voters, for example, in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina in the crucial presidential election of 1940. In the 1938 midterm elections, Mississippi, with a population of more than two million, had only 35,000 voters. 

There are few activities more troubling in a democracy than intentionally limiting the size of the electorate, although that’s now standard Republican policy, especially in the South.

Professor Lehmann thinks that the South described by Professor Katznelson is too homogeneous. Lehmann argues that there have been significant differences between Southern politicians regarding civil rights and economic issues. Nevertheless, if you want to understand where America is today, Lehmann’s review of Katznelson’s book is terrific reading. So, probably, is the book. 

(A personal note: when I was in college, I read something by a black author who claimed that the status of black people has been the central issue in the history of our country. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find the quotation or even identify the author. But I remember reading that statement some 40 years ago and being highly skeptical. The more I learn about American history, however, the more I’ve come to agree.)

Kitty Genovese Was Raped and Killed 50 Years Ago, But…

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Everybody who was around in 1964 knows the story of Kitty Genovese. She’s the young woman who was stabbed to death on a street in New York City while 38 witnesses supposedly did nothing to help.

The lesson we all learned back then was that society was falling apart. People would listen to somebody screaming outside their window and do nothing because “they didn’t want to get involved”, especially a bunch of self-centered, cowardly, unfeeling big-city types. I was only 12 at the time, living on the other side of the continent, but it was easy for me and everyone else to form a mental image of what happened that night: a woman repeatedly crying for help in a narrow street or alley as onlookers looked down from their windows or sat on their fire escapes doing nothing.

An article in the New York Post (by the way, one of the most unreliable newspapers in America) tells a very different story, based on a new book called Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America.

It was 3 a.m. Somebody called the police immediately after Genovese was stabbed on the street (although the police didn’t show up, not realizing the nature of the incident). She was able to walk home but collapsed in her apartment building’s vestibule, not outside where people could hear her. Her killer was initially scared away by a witness, but then followed her into the building and attacked her again. That’s where she died as one of her neighbors held her in her arms.

According to the article, there were two witnesses who were certainly blameworthy. One of them even said “he didn’t want to get involved”. But if you believe the Post article, this is another case in which a story got told and retold because it confirmed something people already believed: people who live in big cities aren’t real Americans and don’t care enough about anyone else to bother calling the cops when a young woman is being raped and murdered. Which, if you’ve ever spent much time in New York City, where you tend to rub shoulders with lots of different people every day, you know isn’t true at all.

On a related note, does living in a city like New York make you more or less accepting of people who don’t look or sound like you? You see people whose families came from everywhere in the world going about their daily business, sitting next to you on the subway, or waiting in line at the deli. Familiarity breeds contempt sometimes, or a bad experience does the same, but I think that sharing space with a wide variety of people all behaving in similar ways tends to make city-dwellers more favorable toward democracy and social programs. Maybe it’s easier to be a liberal, less fearful or disdainful of those “other” people, if you see all manner of human beings up close, following the rules, doing the same things you do every day. 

Memories Are Made of Something

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A lot of us old people are excited about the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. It was February 9, 1964. A Sunday night, of course. I was 12 years old and we were living in an isolated area six miles west of Lancaster, California, in the desert about 70 miles north of Los Angeles. I remember watching the program, as we did every Sunday night, right before Bonanza. Everybody watched Ed Sullivan and Bonanza.

I also remember being excited about the Beatles’ performance that night and how excited my friend Dwight was too. Dwight was a tall, skinny kid, three or four years older than me, which was a little odd, but there weren’t many kids my age where we lived. That night is one of my favorite memories from those years.

Today, however, it occurred to me that by 1964, I was in junior high (the 7th grade) and we had moved into Lancaster, where I attended Piute School (it’s still there). We weren’t living in the desert outside of town anymore and I couldn’t have talked about the show with Dwight. I’m pretty sure he and I never saw each other again after my family moved into town. 

Maybe Dwight and I watched something else one night and were excited about that? And as the years went by I somehow combined that memory with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan? Is it ok that some of the best things we remember never happened? 

At least I don’t remember being at the show in New York City with all those screaming girls, but give me a few years. 

Ulysses S. Grant on Fear

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Ulysses S. Grant, having been appointed to his first military command shortly after the Civil War began, was nervous. He was leading his troops toward what he believed to be the encampment of “Tom Harris and his 1200 secessionists”:

As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris’ camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on.

Then, at last being able to look into the valley, he saw signs that there had been a large camp below, but the secessionists had departed:

My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his.

I really like this guy. I’m glad he was on our side.